SOCIAL STUDIES

EDUCATION
Antonio J. Castro and Ryan Knowles, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, USA
2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved
 SOCIAL STUDIES
EDUCATION
 Originated in the United States as part of 1916 report of the
committee on social studies for the commission for the
reorganization of secondary education (Lybarger, 1990)
SOCIAL STUDIES AS SOCIAL
SCIENCE

 Incorporating the disciplinary concepts, knowledge-based and

strategies of a variety of unique disciplines .
 History, Geography, Economics and etc.

 Socials studies as social education place civic and democratic

teaching as central to the goals and outcomes of social studies.
 3 KEY ASSUMPTIONS
1. The approach grants each discipline (history, geography,
economics, political science, etc.) its own status as an
academic pursuit.

John Braxton and Lowell Hargens

 Codification or consolidation of knowledge into specific

domains, paradigm development, and consensus thinking
both of the later describing common theoretical and
disciplinary habits of mind.
 3 KEY ASSUMPTIONS

2. This view holds that students in various levels of schooling can

acquire foundational aspects of each discipline.

Jerome Bruner

 The process of education proposed that “ any subject can be

taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at
any stage of development”.
 BASE STRUCTURES

 Analytical skills and habits of mind or orientations used to

contract and solve problems

 Spiraled curriculum
 3 KEY ASSUMPTIONS

3. This approach positions the social studies as a loose label meant to

group these disciplines around their general focus on understanding
social life.
 HISTORICAL EDUCATION

 Vanlsedright and Limon (2006)

2 kinds of knowledge to history learning
1. Substantive knowledge
- Conceptual and narrative ideas about what happened in the past
and overarching themes and trends that occur in historical
accounts.
- Refers to knowledge of the past people, events, ideas and so on.
 HISTORICAL EDUCATION
2. Procedural knowledge
-relates to the knowledge of how to research and interpret the historical past, using a
variety of analytical skills and tools.

 Historical Thinking-
- set of habits of mind employed by historians to solve problems of interpreting the
past.
- It also embodies the process by which historical account is constructed various
pieces of evidence.
 ASPECTS OF HISTORICAL
THINKING

 Historical evidence

 Continuity and change

 Progress

 Historical empathy

 Historical agency
 GEOGRAPHIC EDUCATION

 Scholars in geographic education investigate the teaching and

learning of domain specific skills and ways of thinking associated
with the discipline of geography.
 5 THEMES OF GEOGRAPHY

1. Location

2. Region

3. Place

4. Human Environment Interaction

5. Movement
 4 WAYS THAT TEACHERS
VIEWED GEOGRAPHY

1. Interactionist

2. Synthesizers

3. Spatalist

4. Placiest
 ECONOMICS EDUCATION
 Centers on a specific base of disciplinary concepts and skills

 is a field within economics that focuses on two main themes: 1) the current
state of, and efforts to improve, the economics curriculum, materials and
pedagogical techniques used to teach economics at all educational levels; and 2)
research into the effectiveness of alternative instructional techniques in economics,
the level of economic literacy of various groups, and factors that influence the
level of economic literacy.
 4 MAJOR CATEGORIES
1. Fundamental concepts, incorporated ideas such as scarcity, productivity,
incentives, and opportunity cost.

2 and 3. Microeconomics and macroeconomics include a variety of concepts

that affect national, supply and demand, exchange rates, interest rates, fiscal
policy, and income distribution.

4. International economics, introduced students to the topics of comparative

advantage, barriers, to trade, balance of trade and economic growth.
 E C O N O M I C L I T E R AC Y O T H E
ABILITY TO THINK LIKE AN
ECONOMIST
1. There is no such thing as free lunch

2. Thinking incrementally

3. Markets coordinate consumption and production

4. Relative price changes guide decision-making

5. Trade promotes growth

6. Markets can fail

Thank you !!